WWW-Browsers for Linux

There are many browsers available for Linux. I did not find a listing which
I thought to be complete, especially considering non-x86 platforms. This
list tries to accomplish this task. I tried to include all browsers for
web pages (i.e., no pure 3D browsers) which
are available for Linux. If a browser is missing or the information given
is incorrect, I would be very glad if you could give me
the information via email at
browser@helgefjell.de.

The list is limited to browsers for HTML/XHTML/XML. Some might do other
Formats as well (VRML, WAP) but I will not list browsers which are limited
to such a format/protocol.

The column state indicates if and how the browser can be run under Linux/AXP:
Check below for a detailed description.

Since several browsers are either totally out of date or their web page is
no longer available, I split the list into browser with recent development
(i.e. those which are likely to display current web pages) and older
browsers. If you think I misplaced a browser then please mail me.

If you like to use the table in your own work, you may do so under the
GPL. I would be happy to receive proper credit, though.

Conkeror is a Mozilla based web browser (requires Firefox to install) designed to be completely keyboard driven, no compromises. It also strives to behave as much like Emacs as possible. This means all the key bindings and to-die-for features of Emacs that can be imitated by a javascript/XUL web browser Just Work.

Dillo is a small (less than 400 Kb), GTK+ based web browser project completely written in C. It is based on gzilla and armadillo (see below) and aims to be small, stable, developer-friendly, usable, fast and extensible.

dwb is a lightweight web browser based on the webkit web browser engine and the gtk toolkit. dwb is highly customizable and can be easily configured through a web interface. It intends to be mostly keyboard driven, inspired by firefox's vimperator plugin.

Edbrowse is a combination editor, browser, and mail client that is 100% text based. The interface is similar to /bin/ed, though there are many more features, such as editing multiple files simultaneously, and rendering html. This program was originally written for blind users, but many sighted users have taken advantage of the unique scripting capabilities of this program, which can be found nowhere else. A batch job, or cron job, can access web pages on the internet, submit forms, and send email, with no human intervention whatsoever.

Firefox is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform. It has a modularized design and user can install a large number of plug-ins (like googlebar; mouse gestures like in Opera) of the users' choice.

jumanji is a highly customizable and functional web browser based on the libwebkit web content engine and the gtk+ toolkit. The idea behind jumanji is a web browser that provides a minimalistic and space saving interface as well as an easy usage that mainly focuses on keyboard interaction like vimperator does.

Konqueror is the successor of kfm, the file manager and web browser in KDE 1.x. Besides browsing, it can be used as a file manager and universal viewer as well. HTML 4.0, ECMAscript 262, can house Java applets, full CSS1 and partial CSS2, bidirectional scripts and SSL support. In full development. It now supports tabs as well!

LeechCraft is a free open source cross-platform modular live environment. LeechCraft has modules for everything: it allows one to browse the web, chat via instant messaging, listen to music, read RSS/Atom feeds, view documents, download files via BitTorrent and other protocols, automatically download, play or stream podcasts (and other media files) and much more. LeechCraft is a modular system, and by installing different modules you can customize the feature set and keep off the things you don't want.

Links is WWW browser for the console, for the frambuffer and for X,
based on Links. It
displays tables, frames, downloads on background, and features Javascript.
In graphics mode it displays PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and XBM pictures,
runs external bindings on other types, and features anti-aliased font, smooth
image zooming, 48-bit dithering, and gamma and aspect ratio correction.

Opera is a commercial browser currently available free of charge for Linux/Intel, Linux/PPC and Linux/x86_64
. Opera aims to be fully W3C standards compliant but yet to remain a low memory footprint; latest version however do have a larger memory
consumption.

Pale Moon offers you a browsing experience in a browser completely built from its own, independently developed source that has been forked off from Firefox/Mozilla code a number of years ago, with carefully selected features and optimizations to improve the browser's stability and user experience, while offering full customization and a growing collection of extensions and themes to make the browser truly your own.

surf is a simple web browser based on WebKit/GTK+. It is able to display websites and follow links. It supports the XEmbed protocol which makes it possible to embed it in another application. Furthermore, one can point surf to another URI by setting its XProperties.

Uzbl follows the UNIX philosophy — Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. It is component based and highly configurable, stressing keyboard control.

Free, open and private. Inspired by the incredible open source projects that have made the World Wide Web what it is today, we wanted to contribute our part and make a web browser tailored for the power user.

The old reference browser of the W3C. Development continued by Yggdrasil. Latest changes from March, 1997.

Arenai18n

Q

OMRON Corporation has developed to extend Arena to be able to display Chinese, Korean and Japanese characters in one page. OMRON's Arena supports both ISO-2022 and UNICODE. It guesses charset automatically,
/if charest parameter isn't specified in Content-Type field.

Armadillo

Q

Gtk-based browser, formerly called Gzilla (see below). Does not compile, no longer maintained. See dillo above.

A (security) enhanced version of Mozilla. Commercial support available.

BrowseX

Q

BrowseX is a free Open Source, cross-platform Web Browser, E-Mail Program, Talk/Chat client and more. There is a database interface, SQLite, and BrowseX is easily extensible via an API. BrowseX has been written primarily in C and Tcl. The homepage is no longer active.

The cheetah web browser is a project that has been started to create a fully functional, light-weight, bloat-free web browser for Linux (and other free Unix clones) that is not dependant on KDE, GNOME or Mozilla.

debris is a free (see GPL) text mode HTML browser package. It provides tables, forms, a secure environment and is small (only 25% of lynx).

Emacs W3

Emacs/W3 is a full-featured web browser, written entirely in Emacs-Lisp, that supports all the bells and whistles you will find in use on the web today, including frames, tables, style sheets, and much more. An emacs version 20.x or greater is recommended. Currently a modular rewrite is being done.

A free, next generation web browser. When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.

Since Sun's direct support was limited to Solaris for SPARC, Windows NT and Windows 95, Linux users have to get the runtime environment separately and cannot use SSL. If you've tried it with Compaq's JDK (on alpha) I'd be glad to know the results.

Html Viewer 3 (hv3) is a powerful yet minimalist web browser that uses Tkhtml3 as a rendering engine and SEE (Simple ECMAScript Engine) to interpret scripts. The application itself is written in Tcl. See this LWN article for a description.

ICEsoft's family of commercial Java-based browsers, browser toolkits, and related products is available for licensing on embedded devices or enterprise applications and contains a MathML pilot which can render MathML content based on Webeq 2.3. Trial downloads are available. If you've tried it with Compaq's JDK (on alpha) I'd be glad to know the results.

Lobo is an open source web browser that is written entirely in Java. It is being developed with the aim to support HTML 4, Javascript and CSS2. The general goal of the project is to produce a browser that is fast, easy to extend, secure and feature-rich.

Luakit is a highly configurable, browser framework based on the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit. It is very fast, extensible by Lua and licensed under the GNU GPLv3 license. It is primarily targeted at power users, developers and any people with too much time on their hands who want to have fine-grained control over their web browsers behaviour and interface.

The Minimo (Mini Mozilla) project is focused on code-size and runtime footprint reduction, and porting to small consumer devices. The primary focus of Minimo to date has been system with ~32-64 MB of RAM, running Linux and using the GTK toolkit. Other platforms and toolkits have been investigated as well.

Midas

Q T

Midas is very old (1993!), unsupported, crashes if it encounters pages with tables (there weren't any tables in 1993) and is basically of no more than historic interest.

MMM is a WWW browser implemented in Objective Caml using its CamlTk41 interface to Tcl/Tk. Supports HTML 2.0, most of HTML 3.2 and frames. Last modified December 1997.

mMosaic

Q

Based on NCSA Mosaic (see below). Supports Table, one level frame and IPv6/IPv4. The project aims to have a multicasted browser (hence the m). This project has been abandoned.

Mnemonic

Q

Apart from HTML 4.0, Mnemonic will support the W3C standards XML and CSS. There will also be support for mathematics typesetting in the form of MathML and TeX. Currently a GTK-- based version is available, but a text-only interface is expected in the near future. Compiling on Alphas is done internally at irregular intervals. The project is in a terminal coma currently.

SkipStone is a Gtk+ Web Browser that embeds Mozilla's rendering component Gecko. It aims to be light and fast with few dependencies.

Plume/SurfIt

-

Tcl/TK-Browser from Australia. The host no longer exists, also the mirrors from A. Caldwell are gone by now. It can post HTML forms for CGI scripts and can do HTML tables but not frames. With the IMG extension for Tk, they can do most image types found on the web. He also provided a version for Agenda VR3.

Pyleon is an extensible GTK+ web browser written in Python, with support for both Mozilla and GtkHTML. Non-core browser features are implemented as modules so power users can load only their desired features, and programmers can easily add their own.

Lightweight, secure and portable browser having unique user interface and privacy features. QtWeb is an open source project based on Nokia's Qt framework and Apple's WebKit rendering engine (the same as being used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome). QtWeb is so compact and self-sufficient (not much dependencies).

rekonq is a KDE browser based on Webkit. Its code is based on Nokia QtDemoBrowser. It is the product of playing to be a programmer of the author, so the higher its quality is, the better he can play.. He has got lots of ideas to implement in it, so many features that he will like to have in his perfect browser. Anyway, rekonq is far from perfect. It needs a lot of love..

retawq is an interactive, multi-threaded network client (web browser) for text terminals on computers with Unix-like operating systems. It is written in C, fast, small, nicely configurable, and comfortable.

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey all-in-one internet application suite. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users.

Star Office

?

This office-suite can also be used to surf the web. Note that the next version is developed as Open Source on www.openoffice.org and LibreOffice.

The non-free browser Strata (free of charge trial version available) serves as a bridge between local data files, database management systems and data on the web. It can access data from local sources and across the web, mash it together, and then you can quickly work with it to gain new insights or create ad hoc reports to share with others.

The ViewML Browser is an open source project aimed at producing a small memory footprint, high-quality web browser for the rapidly growing embedded Linux market. The ViewML Browser is based on KDE's kfm (KDE file manager), and FLTK (fast light tool kit).

A svgalib web browser — an early version yet. Emphasis is on high quality picture display. Currently requires lynx, the author intends to merge with links in the future. wb0 itself is no longer under development.

Woosh is a minimalistic browser starting up very fast and optimised for small screens. It runs very well on the Neo Freerunner as well as on any netbook like the Acer One or Asus eeePC and features simple gestures for quick access to all important functions.

X-Smiles is a Java based XML browser. It is intended for both desktop use and embedded network devices and to support multimedia services. The main advantage of the X-Smiles browser is that it supports several XML related specifications (including XHTML) and is still suitable for embedded devices supporting the Java environment.
And yes, it runs on alpha using SableVM.

XXXTerm is a minimalists web browser. It strives to be vi-like for heavy keyboard users while maintaining traditional web browser behavior. It is ISC licensed. Newer versions are called xombrero.

Zen

Initially a web browser for the Linux framebuffer, using the library named oFBis, now extending to other frontends as well. Zen is a long term project, and will take an unspecified amount of time to write.